Steven Levitt is co-author of the 2005/2006 global #1 bestseller, Freakonomics, and recently was named one of Time Magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World."

Levitt is the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also director of The Becker Centre on Chicago Price Theory. In 2004, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, which recognises the most influential economist in America under the age of 40. The Wall Street Journal recently said: “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt” because he has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world.

The Sunday Telegraph describes Freakonomics as: “a brilliant, provocative investigation into motives: what they are, how they can be changed, and how they affect what people do. It is also a deceptively easy read: its style is so light, its tone so sunny and humorous, that it is hard to realise the extent to which the arguments in Freakonomics attack some of our most basic assumptions about the way people, and society, work”.